17 of 22Robert & Sandra Bahre's 1934 Packard Twelve Sport Sedan by Dietrich is the Car of the Dome built for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.

Photo by John Katz

18 of 22Robert and Sylvia Affleck's 1938 HRG Airline Coupe took home a Best of Britain award.

Photo by John Katz

19 of 22Smooth driving by Robert Laepple in this 1957 Porsche 356 A scored the fifth-best time of 0-58-11.

Photo by John Katz

20 of 22Spindly 1957 Cooper-Norton of Peter Rehl produced lots of noise and an eighth-place overall, at 58.78.

Photo by John Katz

21 of 22Steve Morici keeps his 1963 Cooper T-67 cool on his way to a third-best-overall time of 57.33

Photo by John Katz

22 of 22Ben Bragg and crew try to find why their 1935 Reuter-Ford Special, nicknamed "The Old Gray Mare," isn't what she used to be.

Photo by John Katz

The June forest is green, dark and dense, crowding the pavement on both sides, revealing only brief segments of the serpentine road. You hear the cars long before you see them, and after some time you know them by their sound. A deep, wooly rumble precedes one of two solid-axle Corvettes. A hard, angry rasp announces one of several Lotus 7s. A higher, still insectile buzz proclaims the ’59 Cooper-Climax T-51, a Yeoman Credit team car once driven by Olivier Gendebien, Harry Schell and Tony Brooks. But our favorite sound belongs to the ’57 Cooper-Norton Mk XI, its single half-liter cylinder hammering like a manic mechanical woodpecker against a steel-plated tree as this impossibly tiny torpedo on four open tires clambers up and around the bend, disappearing again into the trees, leaving only its fading clatter, some faint white smoke and the heady scent of hot oil.

This is the Second Running of the Hershey Hillclimb in its latest re-incarnation as The Grand Ascent: now a two-day prelude to The Elegance at Hershey, one of the newest—and best—Concours on the East Coast.

Other, equally wondrous machines would follow: Hall Fillinger’s 1912 Grand Prix Mercedes, long ago converted to Hall-Scott power. David North’s ’36 Bugatti T.57SC, clearly bodied for competition. Oddest of all was the Bathtub, built a half-century ago by hill-climb legend Bill Rutan using parts from two pre-1953 Beetles, a lot of miscellaneous hardware, and a four-cam Carrera engine, mounted amidships. In ’61, Bill and the ’tub climbed Mt. Washington in nine minutes, 13 seconds, bettering Carroll Shelby’s Formula 1 Ferrari and cementing forever the all-time record on gravel, as the road was paved the following year. On Saturday, restorer Wayne Carini took the ’Tub up Hershey’s 200 vertical feet, through five turns and 0.7 miles, in just 56.53 seconds. But even that mighty effort fell second to Graham Long’s winning 54.70, posted the same afternoon in a ’58 Lotus 7.

Still, it’s Sunday’s Concours that has become both climax and centerpiece of the weekend, and the 2012 edition drew what may well have been the most spectacular collection of polished brass, custom-bodied classics and pre-1960 exotica ever assembled in the Northeast. Where else might it take a moment to realize that that lovely ’34 Packard Twelve Sport Sedan is in fact The Car of the Dome, the gold-appointed one-off built for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair? (It won an American Spirit Award, 1932-’42, for Robert & Sandra Bahre.) Title sponsor Lincoln was well represented, most notably by Edsel Ford’s own 1939 Continental prototype (awarded Best Lincoln—How could it not be?— for owner Bob Anderson); and also by the ’41 Continental coupe bizarrely customized to Raymond Loewy’s taste by Philadelphia coachbuilder Derham.

From a field where every car was a standout, it took the other-worldly 1936 Delahaye 135M Competition Court of Jim Patterson to pin down Best-in-Show; this extreme example of Figoni & Falaschi panel-beating-meets-space/time-bending almost seems to hover without wheels. The People’s Choice reflected a folksier mood, electing the cowboy-bling Cord in which Tom Mix died in 1940.

That said, the real winners were the benefitting charities—the AACA Library & Research Center, the AACA Museum, and the Junior Diabetes Research Foundation International—and any true car nut wise enough to pay the $25 price of admission.